Other opinions: Does NSA surveillance keep us safer?

Given our position on a federal judge's ruling against the National Security Agencies surveillance of Americans' cell phone data - and our call on Congress to do the same - we thought that we'd offer excerpts of other views, including one moderate view that simply calls on the NSA to provide more compelling justification for its activities.

Wall Street Journal

Federal Judge Richard Leon has become a sudden political celebrity after his remarkable opinion holding that antiterror surveillance is unconstitutional and, even more remarkably, enjoining the entire program. If only his legal reasoning were as compelling as his new repute.

?In conjuring his new theory of digital age Fourth Amendment law, Judge Leon also writes that "cell phones have also morphed into multi-purpose devices," such as mapping, text messages and "even lighters that people hold up at rock concerts." He says these devices "now reveal an entire mosaic-a vibrant and constantly updating picture of the person's life."

Well, so what? The NSA isn't surveilling lighters at rock concerts, or creating personal mosaics. The agency is collecting the same basic telephony metadata.

The Tampa Bay Tribune

In 2012, the NSA made fewer than 300 queries, and those queries had to be based on specific suspicious facts.

So there is hardly a pell-mell rummaging of personal information. Moreover, as the Supreme Court found in the 1979 Smith v. Maryland case, there is no presumption of privacy for information people willingly expose to a third party, such as a phone company.

The phone records - not conversations - are what this is about.

It is notable that, as The New York Times reports, last month a federal judge refused to grant a new trial to several San Diego men who had been convicted of sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia. Government officials said the call records program played a part in the investigation. The judge in that case found the men had no right to privacy on the phone data.

Leon, in contrast, found that advances in phone technology make the 1979 case irrelevant, but records are still records, regardless of how much more sophisticated today's phones are or how much more data can be stored.

Washington Post

The bulk collection of phone "metadata" by the National Security Agency (NSA) - records of who's calling whom, when and for how long - is a potentially powerful tool that could, if abused, reveal sensitive facts about nearly every American's life. The practice, disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, demands extensive checks to guard against misuse. The government has said its oversight process is already strong. To varying degrees, a federal judge and a task force appointed by President Obama now have disagreed.

?The NSA's activities will continue to be litigated in court and in the court of public opinion. If the government is to emerge from Mr. Snowden's revelations with the authorities that officials insist are crucial, it will have to do more to demonstrate why they are essential and how Americans' privacy is being protected.